BluRay drives for PC

[R. Neil Haugen]

I'm thinking that going to BluRay would be the best way to get optical backups (bucketed) for the "new" photo archive I'm building for the missus's "brand". There's going to be about a "Tee" and a half of photos to bucketize, and doing say 700 DVD's sounds a bit absurd. Is there anything to be aware of in buying a blu-ray read-write drive for internal use on a PC?

Neil

[K.Murat]

Hi Neil,

Blu-ray disks are made from the same materials as the common DVD or CD, just with the higher density. And the more disks you have the more chance that some of them might be corrupted after some period of time. What will be with your disks after say 10 years, 15 years? I don't know, and you don't know. For better insurance you need to backup your photos on multiple CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disks.

This is not a question of insurance but also a question of convenience. Operate with multiple disks with low I/O speed.

I guess today the price of 1 GB of HDDs is very low, so you might to consider backup your photo collection to HDD.
For example Seagate Barracuda Green (2TB) costs as low as $125.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382026,00.asp

You can also consider a NAS with RAID.

Just my thoughts, probably if the collection is not large the multiple Blu-ray disks is a good option.


--
Regards
Murat

[Niall Horley]

Hi Neil,

As Murat suggested you should use a combination of methods. I use Blu Ray for the conenience of not having to use multiple DVDs along with a NAS drive, with Genie Timeline so I get my whole machine backed up.

The price of hard drives keep falling so if you look at a NAS drive with multiple disks make sure it has the ability to rebuild its self and if more space if available grow the partition. I currently use 2 * 1 TB drives, when I run out of space I can replace the first disc with a 2 TB drive and let the volume rebuild. When complete I can add a second 2 TB drive and once rebuilt I will have the extra space.

There is also the possibility of cloud based services but these are not cheap, but they have the advantage they are off site.

Niall

[R. Neil Haugen]

Apparently I wasn't clear enough ... the images are all being stored on both a "live" drive/s, and on the backup hard-drives (on and off-line). This question referred ONLY to the optical-backup part of the system. As recommended by Peter.

Neil